KM waves - more of the same?

Where is KM headed?

Dave Pollard reviews KM paradigms in this thoughtful post that I somehow missed. He sees a paradigm shift from 1st to 2nd generation KM happening in 2005 that follows these trends:

From text to multimedia:
Connection moves from e-mail and phone to VoIP, IM and web presence.

From surveys and networking engines to conversations and expertise finders:
Content shifts from corporate repositories to personal publishing, from best practices to individual stories, from whiteboards & PM tools to mind-maps & open source, from forums to wikis.

From cost savings to personal effectiveness:
Focus moves from content & collection to context and connection. The shift is from groupware to personal empowerment, from single large systems to many simple local personal applications.

Constraints to KM, we have come to appreciate, are not technology driven but rather inhibited by culture, personal identity and behavior - we need soft affordances and accommodations rather than final fixes.

Like Dave, I left wondering if the KM movement has not lost it's 'memory' and we may be seeing a repetition of past blunders as new participants find their KM elixir?

Comments

[Shawn Callahan]

Hi Denham, I enjoyed Dave's post too. Thanks for the pithy summary. I share your concern that new entrants are making the mistakes characterised by 1st gen KM.

Just last week I reviewed a KM strategy and all the money allocated was for technology widgets and people and cultural initiatives were left to make do with current resource levels-ie. the work will be done by current HR and IT staff.

Compare this to what BHP Billiton is doing. They commit a substantial budget to each community of practice and 1/3 is used for face to face meetings. They have adopted a low technology approach and their CEO is mentioning their KM efforts in his announcement of a $8.5B profit.